I spoke at a SIPA email marketing network evening with two other speakers from Electric Word and Incisive Media.
A really interesting evening, it was very refreshing to see the comments being made about what work and doesn’t work reflecting the recommendations we’ve been making for quite a while.
The main points were
Be relevant, it works:
Target don’t blanket: pushing out emails to loose selections can often be the easiest solution. However, this bad direct marketing practice pushed up unsubscribe rates. If you are working for an organisation with a large number of marketers, all of whom share the database, having a high number of unsubscribers is not good for anyone.
Third party data rentals for email are dangerous:
Attendees reported limited success, but many highlighted experiences of low response rates. This is particularly prevalent if the list is quite high profile and rented a number of times. Some senders had got into problems with getting emails delivered due to black listing issues which caused some serious consequences.
Emotionally unsubscribed are useless:
Review your database. There will be a number of people who have not read any email you have sent them for a number of months. There is some research that extols the brand benefit of simply being in a person’s inbox. However, the budget you are wasting and the dilution of your campaign results this creates means that this benefit has to be out weighed.
When thinking about over what time period you should use to remove people, there is no golden rule, but we’ve been recommending 3 months if you’re sending weekly emails, and the analyse to see if anyone you suppressed resigns up! If there are a considerable number, then extend the time period.
Designs can be improved:
An excellent presentation highlighted that tweaking from names, subject line, the layout of body copy and actual copy tests can impact on campaign results significantly.
Is there an industry best time to send email marketing?
No! Many marketers are sending their email campaigns out through habit- “we always do our newsletter on a Friday as we always have!”. To discover the best time for you to send your email marketing look at your web logs over the past 3 months. See when people have already chosen to come to your site and use that as an indicator.
It is always interesting to be in the presence of people who have such a refreshing approach to testing and are committed to improving their email marketing. I for one took a number of new ideas from it, and are looking forward to the SIPA conference in July and learning more.